The Inheritance And Innovation Of Anciant Greek Tragedy In O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra

Tragedy is a cultural concept which has been developing and evolving in the long history of human being. As a kind of drama, tragedy originated from the performance of the sacrifices-offering to Gods and ancestors. Later, after the glory of the two traditional forms, ancient Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy, along with the social development, tragedy timely presents specific modern features. As one of the greatest playwrights in the early 20^th century of American history, Eugene O'Neill devotes his whole life to tragedy writing, inheriting and innovating tragedy writing in accordance with the ever-changing expression need of the realistic human society. His famous novel Mourning Becomes Electra not only contains the essence of traditional tragedy, but also brings forth new elements in the art of tragedy. This thesis tentatively takes O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra as an opening to unfold his inheritance of ancient Greek tragedies and innovation of tragedy writing by applying certain theories of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics to the said play.According to Aristotle's Poetics, this thesis respectively analyzes the main characters in O'Neill's work and compares the tragic techniques he experimented, the tragic sense manifested in this work and the tragic effect he aroused by help of those of ancient Greek tragedies'. Firstly, according to Aristotle's Poetics, plot is the soul in ancient Greek tragedies, and the character is only a puppet-like role whose behavior is determined by the will of the writer. However, O'Neill's characters act and speak in accordance with their own wills and instincts. Underneath their conquered or conquerable physical entities and their spiritual souls there is uniformly an inextinguishable quality-eternal pursuit of human nature in human existence. Living in this world, man is persistently fighting with an unknown power. In ancient Greek tragedies his rival was the omniscient God and in O'Neill's tragic creation the disharmony between incompatible or antithetical conflicts in his mental world turns out to be the most powerful opponent of himself. Secondly, O'Neill's other great experiments are the more extensive use of the ancient Greek tragic techniques - the mask to show his characters' spiritual changes and conflicts and the chorus made up of town people to formally introduce the narrative background significant to the progression of the action or the plot. Thirdly, from ancient Greek tragedies to modern tragedies the author's tragic sense finds its way to the exploration into man's nature and existence. In Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill once again shows us the splendor of the tragic sense that man has to face mysterious demonic forces in his own nature and outside. It not only makes up fatalism in Tragedy and fills tragic works with paradoxes, but also shows man's consciousness of the world and of himself, that's the awareness of self-fulfillment and of his own tragic situation. Fourthly, concerning tragic effect, or the tragic pleasure, or the tragic spirit, Aristotle puts forward that Tragedy arouses pity and fear in the audience and produces effect on them through purifying such emotions in their minds. However, fear and pity are not the only feelings aroused in the audience by O'Neill's plays, they also manifest to us without any reservation the highest truth of the universe: life is a course filled with a hopeless hope and this hope is reflected in man's hopeless resistance with his destiny, so are his rational spirit and willpower. Therefore, the tragic effect or pleasure is a sublime spirit of envisaging painful realities of life, resisting the tease of fate and striving for freedom of life.Finally, the thesis comes to its conclusion that O'Neill not only inherits the fundamental and crucial elements from the traditional Tragedies but also embodies the features of modern tragedies which discloses an invariable truth that the inheritance and innovation are both inevitable in literary styles and in literary history. All the great literary works of the corpus of world literature are the painstaking production of all the literary writers' life-devotion to the inheritance and innovation of the art of literature. The analysis the author has practiced in the thesis could also be applied to the study of other literary works.